The Internet is organized in large part by keywords. In this regard, keywords are stored on a website to indicate to an Internet search engine the information and content that is contained on a particular page on that website. For example, if a website relates to car ports, then the website owner will utilize keywords that relate to the car port industry. Such keywords may include, for example, “car ports”, “metal car ports”, “buildings”, “RV covers”, and “boat covers”. Thus, if an Internet user searches for metal car ports, then the car port website would be included in the search results.
By providing website owners with control over the selection of metadata (e.g., keywords) for their websites, such website owners have the ability to make their websites appear high in the search results returned by a search engine. In this regard, website owners who select keywords frequently used by Internet users in performing searches for a particular subject will appear higher in search result listings than website owners who select less used keywords for the same subject. Thus, businesses that dedicate their resources (e.g., time and money) to the selection of keywords typically appear higher in Internet search results than businesses that do not.
Moreover, some websites will appear high on a listing of Internet search results even though those website are not particularly relevant to what is being searched for by the Internet user. This is because some businesses utilize keywords that do not even relate to the content that is provided on their website. This method often misleads Internet users into visiting websites that they were not even searching for. Thus, Internet search results that stem from this method are oftentimes irrelevant and not useful to Internet users.
In order to prevent website owners from having too much control over Internet search results, major search engines have used a variety of techniques to control search results. For example, search engines may track the number of visitors on particular website, the website's keywords, the number of websites that link to that page, the words and the paragraphs on the page, and whether such words or paragraphs are relevant to the search terms entered by the user. By using these parameters, search engines have been, to a certain degree, able to limit the ability of website owners to control the results of a particular search.
Additionally, some search engines allow Internet users to “tag” websites that they deem relevant to their search terms. For example, if an Internet user searches for a car port and the search returns a website with the keywords “car port”, then an Internet user can tag that particular website as being relevant to his or her search. This data can then be used to return more relevant search results in response to other similar searches. However, this approach requires the Internet user to actually tag relevant results, which many user's simply do not do.
Other technology used by search engines include natural language searching and semantic searching. This technology allows search engines to understand the natural language and semantic structure of a search to determine the meaning of search words. For example, the word “bark” may mean “bark from a tree” or “did you hear that dog bark?” When search engines are able to understand the natural language of a search, they return better and more relevant search results.
Moreover, the Internet is not necessarily organized according to the geographic location where websites are based. For example, a website may be based in North Carolina, but may provide goods or services for people who live in Arizona. This makes it very difficult for the Internet to be organized by geographic regions because there is no real way to determine a particular geographic location to which a website is relevant. Some companies, including local.com and Google, have tried to organize their search results according to the end user's geographic location. In this regard, these companies try to narrow Internet search results by geographic region by requiring the Internet user to provide additional information (e.g., their zip code or city name) with a search inquiry. However, many Internet users will not undertake these extra steps.
Thus, there is a long felt need for a system and method that better organizes information available on the Internet in such a way that search engines can use reasoning to intelligently provide geographically relevant search results with no (or very little) input from Internet users.